


indigo pears

by iosis



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-26
Updated: 2015-09-26
Packaged: 2018-04-23 11:56:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4875916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iosis/pseuds/iosis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>there’s bookshops and busstops and railway crossings, an entire map of where the bits of himself he once shared with Kaneki got left behind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	indigo pears

**Author's Note:**

> written a while ago in response to tg:re.

He’s come to dislike sunlight at its brightest.

 

He’s asked Kanae to retrieve the heavier curtains and drape his window so that he could remain in the dusk for longer. Although no longer a boy, Kanae was still too short to reach the suspended rod, so Tsukiyama pulled over a chair and held the woven material in place as his little page worked to hook everything together. He smiled at him then, and Tsukiyama smiled back, letting the drapes fall in place, and the light has been gone.

The light makes it difficult to remember. Darkness is a constant, a point of stability, an irreplaceable variant, and in the darkness it’s so very easy for him to imagine. He is not there. He is back where he belongs and there is a shape of another beside him, silver hair strewn all over the pillow and a curve of a spine that fits against his body like no other. The smell of coffee and old books and roses and gunpowder – they’re all clichés trapped inside this room, and if he doesn’t leave and if light doesn’t come, he can pretend everything is like it’s supposed to be.

 

‘He is not here,’ is the first thing he hears waking up in the middle of the many nights surrendered to the same dreams, over and over. Kanae hovers beside him, a glass of water in one hand, an old-fashioned lamp in the other. He must have heard him screaming in his sleep - again. The poor thing looks so distressed Tsukiyama wants to comfort him, wants to sit up and smile and give him a word of encouragement or an embrace of reassurance. Wants to clasp the smaller hand in his and squeeze energy into it like he used to do when a younger Kanae used to come to him with all the worries in the small periphery of his world.

 

Now, he doesn’t have the strength to hold the glass up.

 

The darkness makes it easier when he feeds.

 

There’s no longer a need to hunt his prey in a traditional sense. He doesn’t mourn his sense of smell – his perception of movement has become more acute, as if each coagulation of jet-black air his next victim moves against was a giant web and he was the spider condemned to it. Sometimes Kanae brings someone in, behind closed doors and jalousies. Sometimes, when the hunger gets unbearable, his blood sets aflame with a new kind of urgency and he hunts beneath the stars and there’s no trace of it by the morning. Sometimes he’s confused over how much stronger he’s gotten, how little of a threat anyone possesses to him, but he doesn’t ponder on it much.

 

The culinary prejudice against cannibalism, Tsukiyama discovers, is unfounded. Ghouls, humans, even the mysterious one-eye he has a run-in with once – they’re not all that much different from one another.

 

They all taste vile.

 

He should have eaten Kaneki when he had the chance to.

That way, his blood would always remain flowing, his scent would always follow him around whenever he went, his heart would beat within his own. That way, nothing would ever separate the two of them. Not even death.

 

Tsukiyama spends a lot of time in bed, or in the chair by the window, or on the floor in the corner. If you close your eyes, you can concentrate on every point where your body touches something, the texture of the sheets around you, the weight of your body, the points of contact where your skin meets empty air. Little proofs of being alive.

 

There’s days when the darkness recedes.

When he looks at all the worry and despair Kanae wears so gracefully and Chie fails to dismiss, sometimes the air changes, guilt and nostalgia settling in every corner of his room. It’s suffocating.

 

On days like this he goes outside.

 

Tokyo has become a ghost town. A necropolis of neon lights and empty intersections growing over with grass. Morning fog so thick you can’t see the sky, can’t know it’s not long before spring comes.                

Some areas hold more life than others.

The café on the corner breathes warmth. This is the first time he took Kaneki somewhere, properly, with nothing in mind – honestly, mon cher, I just want to spend some time with you – no, this is not another scheme, whatever trust in me you’ve left is far more precious than any meal. Their coffee mugs had left damp circles of that table in the corner – two loops of a diagram, mutually exclusive.

 

There’s a small store on the corner of the 4thward that stands out from the monotonous drone of existence – it emits soft music. This is an old record store – they’ve discovered it on Kaneki’s initiative, for a change. The boy helped him pick a few records – classics, baroque, a mix of French chanson, but dodged around any revelations as to what music he might enjoy himself. He confessed it one of the following days, that he never knew much about music, nor really cared for it. Even now, Tsukiyama smiles fondly, remembering the surprise in his eyes when he brought out his phone and offered him the right headphone. (‘Surely you didn’t expect me to listen to nothing but records?’ ‘I mean, you do come off extravagant and old-fashioned at times’, quiet embarrassed laughter, Kaneki’s excitement at the one song he’s heard ages ago and never found of the name of. The space between their knees and elbows as they recline back on the couch, the wire of the headset taut between them.)

 

It’s not real, Tsukiyama knows, none of it is.

 

There’s bookshops and bus stops and railway crossings, an entire map of where the bits of himself he once shared with Kaneki got left behind. His favourite place is nothing spectacular, though it keeps a fragment of his soul well secure. The first time Kaneki kisses him is when they’re standing among all the weeds and rubbles of an urban wasteland because he’s read some vignette by some Souviet author translated to English that spoke of such urban wastelands and how they made you colourblind, and he said he wanted to explore if their ward held any of this charm. It’s important that Tsukiyama visits - otherwise the weeds and the rubble might forget the way their lips brushed together and the point of tenderness as Kaneki’s hand made its way down his face, and the warmth of his laughter as they stood there embracing. Tsukiyama remembers.

 

He’ll remember, always.

Each time he makes his way along the curb of this corner he makes a promise to this Kaneki – not to the SS rank catastrophe to his kind and the CCG alike, not to the blood drying beneath fingernail stained black. Not even to the most exquisite meal he’s had an appetiser of - but to the boy laughing in his arms when he memorised the contours of his face with his lips, as he whispered confessions in Latin (it seemed the very forthright of all languages back then.) That this isn’t forever – he wasn’t always like this, and this has to change sometimes – Kaneki would hate to see him like this so he must try, must get better at some point, right, right, my dear, mi corazón, mon raison?

It’s not real. Darkness does not stop days and nights flowing into weeks and months, and maybe he’s not real either, chiselled by all this time. Maybe the only one still real is Ghoul Investigator Haise Sasaki, looking at him from a photograph by his bedside. Chie has taken it and brought it, the little mouse doing what she can to reignite hope within him. She has not yet known hope can be deadly. Tsukiyama dares not leave himself at its mercy again.

 

He desires, though. Wishes that is Haise does exist, that one day he, too, will remember.

Wishes that when the memories will come, they’ll be of the same gentle bittersweet flavour as when they come to him.

**Author's Note:**

> there is in fact a short story called Love by Soviet writer Yuri Olesha about urban wastelands and indigo pears, but it was never translated into English and has nothing in common with Tokyo Ghoul orz  
> concrit and feedback and requests are always welcome [ here](http://prismatic0re.tumblr.com) <3


End file.
